I had a near-religious experience at the ballpark today.
This may come as a shock to those who know me well, especially those who have met me in the past five years. Atheist; agnostic; Humanitarian; Pastafarian; choose whatever word you’re comfortable with for not believing in a personal god. There’s not a word in there I like to describe myself, for the same reason that people who don’t like tennis don’t use a word to describe themselves.
It’s a beautiful Memorial Day afternoon at Turner Field. The Braves have a 6-1 lead over the world champions from Boston. Clay Buchholz doesn’t have it. He can’t throw a strike, and the reeling Red Sox needed him today. They’ve lost 10 straight, and the bottom of the AL East is an ugly place for the proud, usually-swaggering Sox.
We “nones” don’t think we have it all figured out, you know. But we come by it honestly. We just see a set of beliefs and we say, “you know, I don’t think this is right.” And that’s where I’ll leave the word “we” behind and speak for only myself.
It’s the top of the fifth, and a hot, sunny day is turning breezy. Braves pitcher Ervin Santana has kept Boston in check and knows he’s got to make it through one more inning. He’s due to lead off the bottom of the fifth, when he will almost certainly be lifted for a pinch hitter. He has to deal only with the bottom of the Boston order.
I would love to believe that when my loved ones die, they go to a happier place, but I don’t think they do. Why should it be hard to accept that they just cease to be? They didn’t exist before their lives; why should it be hard to accept that they don’t exist afterward? Miracles, too -- they’re so fun to think about. It’s so enriching, for some reason, to believe that the entire universe bent perfectly, obligingly, miraculously just to show something to ME. I sometimes wish I could accept that, unreservedly. Most of the time, I don’t. I think things happen for reasons, and if we understand the reasons, we understand the event.
Mendoza induces a groundout from Grady Sizemore. He’s maybe moving a little more slowly, but he’s still rolling. The ballpark is full of disappointed Red Sox fans.
I will tell you that most of the moments of transcendent awareness in my life have come at a ballpark. That clean line where the brown dirt meets the emerald grass. The color in the eighth inning of an indigo sky struggling to hang on to its last bit of daylight. The ballpark has been my church; my place to dream and uncover truths, and to try to understand this life.
For the Sox fans, skies are turning dark both figuratively and literally. There may be a storm coming. With storms popping up right over Atlanta, it could rain for three minutes or three hours. If Santana closes out the inning, the ballgame will have reached the 4 ½ innings it needs to be considered official. If it decides to rain the rest of the night, the game will be called a Braves victory. Santana strikes out Jackie Bradley, Jr. and needs one more out to get there.
I want to assure you that I’m not about to tell you I witnessed a miracle at the ballpark today. I didn’t. I’ve seen a lot of improbable events at the ballpark, and you know, as many times as this game has been played over the years, it still has the ability to show you something that you have never seen, and that NO ONE has ever seen. Fun as it might be to think about, I don’t think a miracle has ever happened on a baseball field. To put a finer point on it, I don’t want to believe in a higher power that allows unspeakable acts of cruelty and evil to happen every day yet concerns itself with the outcome of baseball games.
Santana seems to be feeling some pressure, and he commits the sin of walking the ninth-place batter, pinch hitter Daniel Nava.
Many years ago, in my youth, I used to think of life as a series of tests put before me by god. Good events were blessings; bad events were curses. I would be rewarded for passing tests and punished for failing. In short, things happened to me. And although I know that I’m more comfortable now believing that I make things happen, I know there’s a loss of innocence. I gave up my childish, romantic way of thinking, exchanging it for a deeper, more accurate understanding.
Leadoff man Brock Holt smacks a line drive to right field and legs out a double. It’s just the Sox’s second extra-base hit against Santana, and the Boston faithful finally see a chink in the armor. If they can get just two more men on base, they can get to David Ortiz. And that guy is clutch. Everyone knows that.
There’s a certain romance shared by baseball fans. We cherish The Game as something bigger than ourselves, which connects us to our fathers and grandfathers and all of the players of The Game who have come before. We cherish its cathedrals. The game looks like a graceful ballet, with outcomes determined by mysterious but powerful forces. There’s beauty in the way an outfielder glides to the ball. There’s grace in the way he removes it from his glove and smoothness in the way he throws it back. And everyone knows that the game was won by the big slugger because “he’s clutch.”
Ortiz is the guy that always comes through when the situation is tough. He won last year’s championship for Boston pretty much singlehandedly. For the love of god, he’s the man who, in 2004, ended The Curse of the Bambino!
My loss of that innocence came slowly. To begin with, the game is not a ballet. It’s played by men -- sweaty, strong, dirty men who train their entire lives to make the incredibly athletic look incredibly easy. The outfielder who glides to the ball is putting into motion the incredibly refined skill to judge the future position of a ball based on a shockingly fleeting fraction-of-a-second look at its velocity, direction and spin.
Twenty-two-year-old Aruban shortstop Xander Bogaerts works a veteran at bat. He makes Santana throw more pitches than he wants to and takes a walk. The first drops of rain strike the filled seats of Turner Field.
The next thing to clear my misty eyes was the realization that those finely tuned athletes… though they may care about the game, they don’t care, in the same sense that I do, about The Game. For them, it’s a job, and a hard one. They play it hard so that we may wax poetic about how their sweat connects us to our fathers and all the players from decades ago; but I promise, they have never heard of Cap Anson nor do they care about how he played The Game.
Next, the more baseball games you watch, the more you realize that the things which influence the outcomes of games are amazingly random. The game-winning hit was only so because it was out of the reach of the third baseman by two inches. Those two inches translate, on a spherical ball and a cylindrical bat, to a couple of microns, which determines the trajectory of the ball. It’s not an overstatement to say that a couple of grains of dirt on the bat’s barrel could determine the difference between a hit and an out. And while that’s a neat thought, it’s enough to tell you that larger, mysterious forces are not at play. It’s chaos and randomness; so many variables that they can’t adequately be accounted for. But there is no Great Mind that controls the game.
Dustin Pedroia, the best second baseman in the game, hits a line drive just inches in front of the point in left field where Justin Upton could have caught it with a dive. Upton fields it on a hop instead and two runs score. With two on and two out, Ortiz is due at the plate.
Hold on to the idea of “No Great Mind,” please, as I tell you about the final step to my loss of innocence about baseball. It’s called sabermetrics.
Sabermetrics aren’t pushing an agenda. The name is taken from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). It’s a catch-all name for a new and deeper level of statistics and probabilities. The practitioners of sabermetrics weren’t necessarily looking to replace the public’s understanding of the game by evolving the traditional metrics of the game. But the deeper they probed, that’s exactly what they did. A set of probabilities could be laid out for everything, and though they may not control for every variable, it’s possible to begin to think about baseball as not a game played by human beings but chaos determined only by a series of probabilities.
They call Ortiz “Big Papi,” a nickname that reflects at once the Dominican’s stature physically, his position of respect as a teammate, and his accomplishments as a player. Statisticians list Papi as 6-foot-4, 230 pounds. He probably hasn’t been 230 pounds since seventh grade. He has some of the biggest hits of the last 15 years in all of baseball.
There is a stat called BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play). It is a simple equation: it simply measures a batter’s batting average when he hits a fair ball. It can also be used for pitchers, to determine the batting average they allow when their opponents hit a fair ball. The day I officially had my mind blown was the day that I learned this: every pitcher allows pretty much the same BABIP. Allow that to sink in for a moment and consider what it means. It means that all a pitcher can really do is prevent you from putting the ball in play (i.e., strike you out). If the ball is in play, essentially every pitcher is as good as every other. It means that the trajectory of the ball, and whether it will create a hit or an out, is essentially random, with a defined hit probability of about 30%. The day I learned that is the day I went beyond the pale. I began to feel as if a baseball game is nothing but a game of Strat-O-Matic, but with a few more rolls of the dice.
It doesn’t stop there. By careful analysis of the numbers, we can pretty much determine that hit streaks happen randomly. “Hot” and “cold” streaks happen randomly. In fact, ALL outcomes happen randomly, and when an observer says “he’s hot at the plate,” it’s a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). A “hot streak” is just a label we assign retroactively to the point in the dataset where the random distribution of hits was high. Ugh.
Baseball players themselves, by the way, are masters of post hoc thinking. Their hot streaks and cold streaks are forever owing to the socks they pulled up, or didn’t; the beard they shaved, or didn’t. And they do it for a reason. “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, or because you wear women's underwear, then you ARE!” screamed Crash Davis in one of the poigniant moments of Bull Durham. “And you should know that!”
But is Big Papi actually good in the clutch, in any sense that can be proven? Show me the evidence! Well, even last season, when he batted .309, he batted just .315 with runners in scoring position. He was 86 points BETTER with no outs than with two outs. In situations defined as close and late, he batted just .204. The numbers are similar throughout his career. The numbers are clear.
Follow that post hoc thinking one more step, and you find that there is no such thing as “the clutch.” It can’t be shown that any player is so good in pressure situations that his abilities are out of the range of probability. His abilities in what we define as “the clutch” are just as good as always, and we can expect him to perform reasonably close to the same. A player who we determine to be good in pressure situations (or “be clutch,” as the vernacular goes) is just a retroactive way of saying that the player’s success in those defined situations has been slightly above his normal averages, though even THAT happens randomly. Sometimes a player will be above his averages, sometimes below.
Not only is Big Papi not “clutch,” but there IS NO SUCH THING as clutch.
Still, there’s something about Papi’s lumbering bearing and easy smile. I can’t see it from the stands, but I know it’s there. (Or did I make it up?) Ervin Santana knows it’s there too. (Or did he also make it up?) He’s in charge of this situation and he can tie this game. Everyone in the stands recognizes this as a clutch situation. The inning has gone on too long for Santana, who can get a win if he gets one more out. But no stat sheet identifies this as a clutch situation. Not in the fifth inning.
The idea that there is no clutch flies directly in the face of traditional baseball wisdom. Of course there is such thing as the clutch, and of course there are players who thrive in it. Take away the numbers, and we KNOW this to be true. Right? RIGHT?!?!?!
How could we possibly know this if there’s no evidence to support it? Did we make it all up? All of it? Oh my god, please tell me that this game, AND BY EXTENSION THIS LIFE is not all just cold probabilities just because there’s no evidence of anything else. Maybe we’re just not looking in the right place for the evidence?
BANG. David Ortiz hits a majestic long drive that sizzles over center field and slices just left of center as it clears the fence. It’s a home run. Of course. Tie game.
Why did it happen? Who gives a shit, it’s gone.
That Papi is so clutch.
